Friday 2nd November 2001
Douglas Hele (81), leading British motorcycle designer died. He was involved in the design and development of many famous British motorcycles for companies such as Norton and Triumph. Towards the end of his career he worked as a development engineer on the Norton rotary engined bikes.
He was one of the few world-class engineers the postwar British motorcycle industry produced, and probably the greatest motorcycle development engineer of all time. After King’s Norton secondary school in Birmingham, where he was viewed as an outstanding scholar, his son felt fortunate to get into the same firm’s rigorous, five-year apprenticeship scheme, and soon came to management’s notice as the most brilliant student of his intake. During the second world war, he was kept at Austin working on the design and manufacture of forging dies. But his heart was in motorcycles and, after 1945, he moved to Douglas – only to undergo an experience all too common in British engineering.
The Douglas flat twin bikes had good engines, but dire handling. Doug, full of hope and enthusiasm, approached the chief designer, George Halliday, with a series of innovative ideas to cure the problems. The result would have been an outstanding all-round motorcycle, but, as Doug remembered: “Instead of encouraging me, [Halliday] made it very, very clear that my career at Douglas was over and that it was not a good idea to stay.”
In 1949, Doug was recruited by Bert Hopwood, chief designer of BSA, then the world’s biggest motorcycle manufacturer, to redesign the BSA MC1 road racer. The bike was to be BSA’s blue riband project, and had been drawn by Hopwood. But, in its original concept, the engine could not have run because the valves would not have opened. As Doug noted: “This is not a minor mistake.”
Doug was given two years to design a masterpiece of practical race engineering – and he was proud of it – but political bickering within the factory killed off the bike when it was on the verge of success. But no one became a design engineer, he observed, if he was the kind of person devastated by management decisions.
In 1955, he joined Norton, based in Bracebridge Street, Birmingham. Here, in the midst of Victorian squalor and archaic working practices, he worked alongside Polish designer Leo Kusmicki refining the ageing Manx Norton race engines. Norton’s world-championship winning era had been ended by the domination of multi-cylinder Italian machines; new designs should have replaced the Manx Nortons, but had not done so. There was an alternative, developing the Dominator 88 tourer into a briefly successful production racer, the Domiracer, but, starved of investment, it was abandoned. In 1963, Doug rejoined the BSA group. There, he produced the three-cylinder bike – known as the BSA Rocket 3 and the Triumph Trident – which kept the two marques in business five years after they should have collapsed in the face of the more technologically-advanced Japanese and continental industries. Doug’s triple machine was a stroke of genius, providing a cash-starved factory with a modern, multi-cylinder design for the minimum of investment and development. He designed the bike at home, and, once again, factory politics delayed its introduction; it could have been available years before its main rival, the 750cc four-cylinder Honda, had Doug received the recognition he deserved.
Again, with almost no funding compared with the Japanese race teams’ mammoth budgets, he then developed the three-cylinder road bike into one of the great race machines of its era, dominating both American and European racing. Working with volatile and strong-willed racers and engineers, he won affection bordering on near-worship from everyone with whom he came into contact.
American Grand National motorcycle champion Gary Nixon recalled Doug as “a hell of a smart guy”. “He was liked by all the Triumph people in America -and that was hard because they often didn’t even like each other.”
One of Doug’s development mechanics, Norman Hyde, described the atmosphere at Triumph. “Doug was incredibly focused and absolutely meticulous. He was also genuinely interested in the mechanics’ opinions. He used to say: ‘There are no bosses in a technical discussion.’ All he ever wanted was to get things right.”
Until a few months before his death, Doug worked with me on a series of articles for Classic Bike magazine, full of revelations about his career
